I’m told pregnancy is rough. So we created a campaign for a line of prescription prenatal vitamins that reflects that reality, and not the high heels, yoga, and shopping sprees depicted by other vitamin brands. Out of everything in my portfolio, these ads still have the highest approval rating from the wife.
If you put your kids on the bus in the morning you know that deeply buried worry that something could happen to them and it’s out of your control. If you’re the parent of a kid with life-threatening allergies, that fear is magnified by about a jillion. Anaphylaxis can happen anywhere, so it’s best to be prepared.
Merrimack, a biotech in Cambridge, was having a difficult time communicating to investors and potential talent what made them different. Their approach, known as Systems Biology, is simply an engineering-like approach to drug discovery and development. It models and predicts, then it builds. So we simply said that.
This rebrand included a little bit of everything, starting with an open, mid-construction logo and new tagline, Cures are built. It continued with print, website, OOH, internal signage, and unique touches, like employee tributes to those affected by cancer found in each email signature.
When we were asked to rebrand OmniPod, a wearable insulin delivery device for people with Type 1 diabetes, we did our research. And we quickly found that this community of active people who would not be restrained by their condition referred to themselves as Podders.
Well don’t fight it for Godsake. Lean into it!
Ever heard of von Willebrand disease? Neither had I, but it’s the most common kind of bleeding disorder. This disease awareness program helped patients recognize that what they were experiencing wasn’t just excessive bleeding, or a heavy period, but a serious medical condition. And that they weren’t alone.
The colon cancer home diagnostic that birthed a million office jokes is now used once every eleven seconds. And it all started with a little pneumonic, Get, Go, Gone.
I can’t take credit for the many successful TV ads that followed, but I didn’t exactly have nothing to do with it.
We developed a disease state awareness campaign called the CML Response Project to draw oncologist attention to the too frequent failure of early-line therapies for chronic myeloid leukemia. These failures occurred due to mutations.
Mutations. Hmmm, how do you depict those in a non-threatening way that’d get doctors talking?
Smokers go back to smoking because that’s just what they’re going to do. Do you just give up on them? Well no, you gotta keep working on it. It’s a process that takes many failed attempts before you finally achieve full cessation.
And that’s okay! It’s about time someone said it.
For a brief moment in the summer of 2020, we had won the Moderna business and were going to produce a market prep campaign for their COVID-19 vaccine. That happened, at least partially, on the strength of a single idea I had authored. A modern vaccine is different from its predecessors.
It was expected resistance to the vaccine would come from all across the political and idealogical spectrum, and we had to help overcome that.
The results of the 2020 election changed Moderna’s thinking, and despite having an illustrator hired and production work underway, they backed out. I’m still proud of the work—though the resistance would end up coming from very different quarters. I could write volumes about that!
Pitches, man. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes you have some pretty fun work that, win or lose, deserves to see the light of day again.
Remember ads? Just a client in need of a single 4CS, not some 360, multichannel, brand platform campaign. They still happen on occasion.
I’d been at precisioneffect for 7 years when I was asked to rebrand our internal culture. I was scared shitless and didn’t want the job. My target audience was right in front of me, I worked with them everyday. They’d see right through whatever contrivance I came up with. Then again, I wouldn’t want the assignment to go to anyone else.
Watching Wecentricity get adopted and loved by 3 offices and nearly 200 colleagues has been a career highlight.
precisioneffect was once known as Lehman Millet, and we were trying to break out of our device and diagnostic mold and into pharma. I forget the brief, but I’m sure it was along the lines of “we see things differently.”
